Why We Recommend Engine Yard for Hosting Ruby Apps

I often get asked by clients, peers and other developers about Engine Yard vs. other hosting solutions. Here’s a breakdown of reasons based on our experience working with a number of service providers over the last few years.

Engine Yard vs.

Managing Amazon EC2 instances directly: we’ve built our own server images for Amazon EC2 in the past and managed them, so we know first hand the time and effort involved with a DIY-approach. Engine Yard has a mature, sophisticated stack that runs on top of Amazon EC2. Coupled with an easy-to-use Web-based dashboard, Engine Yard Cloud makes it super easy for development-centric organizations like ours to deploy and manage client systems without having to deal with the complexity of EC2. In addition, data is persisted to Amazon EBS, so we don’t have to worry about setting up our own internal processes or writing custom scripts for handling backups and persistence.

Other hosting service providers: if you are running your own virtualized servers on behalf of clients or for your own needs, there are many things you have to deal with. Configuring the server, compiling custom components, setting up monitoring, configuring maintenance processes and tasks (e.g. log rotation), and especially security. Over time, we’ve been moving away from handling these details ourselves so that we can focus on the things that we do best and keep our operations lean. We prefer a sophisticated cloud management solution instead. On top of that, it’s refreshing to receive security advisories from Engine Yard about patches to Nginx or similar — these patches are deployed through a single-click in our Engine Yard Cloud dashboard.

Other cloud management solutions: the problem with these other options is they don’t have the resources on staff who understand Ruby-based architectures the way EY’s engineers do. Engine Yard has experienced, world-reknown Ruby engineers behind their stack like Ezra. Other companies claim they support Ruby but when complexities arise, they simply can’t deliver the level of support the way EY does. All it requires is a simple comparison of the content in the knowledge base and customer support forum managed by Engine Yard with their competitors. It’s clear that Engine Yard has Ruby developers at the top of its priority list.

Over the last few months, we’ve been migrating existing clients as well as some of our own apps to Engine Yard. We appreciate their awesome service and support. This is why we’re proud to be one of their partners.